Kierk takes off down the watery streets, the air hot and compressed and wet in each breath. He runs without a destination, progressing randomly, taking side streets and looping back, stopping to orient himself only occasionally as his endorphins battle his queasiness. He waits for the cross signs at streets, jogging in place with the pedestrians. Soon he begins to run straight out, zigzagging across streets to avoid having to wait, his sneakers throwing up flecks of water that wet the back of his shirt. Kierk feels that he is always flipping between two modes of thought when he is running, like looking at a Necker cube. In one mode, he is a homunculus guiding the machinery of his body faster and faster, driving it to ignore its small complaints, a small squatting demon behind his eyes. In the other his thoughts expand, lose precise form, bind with his flushed body to become a single identity, so that he is every aching muscle and gasp for breath, embodied and expansive. Today is like that—his sneakers are soaked through, he can feel his toes squish with each step. He sniffs deeply, smelling morning petrichor. His hangover throbs with each step, but he actually likes it now; the dimensions of his hangover are in some ways appealing, a presence he knows, and he’s never stopped to appreciate exactly how maximally annoying and painful a hangover of this magnitude is, how it has a warp and a shape to it, a distinct brutish thing unto itself, and isn’t it morally obvious that something is better than nothing?

As he runs Kierk’s thoughts wander to Atif, whose departure is so sudden it feels like something as delicate as a soap bubble was popped. When Kierk imagines the underground scene, the suddenness of it, he sees Atif’s skull coming apart sensibly, like a jigsaw puzzle hammered in midair, and then through the open remainder of the head would pour a parade of images and thoughts, all the silk Technicolor memories from childhood cartoons to personal sex scenes, all slinking and bursting forth in a great cavalcade, a world compressed like pressurized air inside a skull. But then he thinks about what really happened. Just a bunch of gray mucus expelled.

Soon he finds himself inexorably approaching the rain-washed sign that reads BLEECKER STREET STATION. It sits in the wet air like an eye, an omen, and Kierk spends some time in front of it with his hands on his knees, breathing hard. There are a few people milling about, coming up from Lafayette Street, but mostly the rain has driven everyone away and the streets are quiet and humming with a humid heat. He imagines the way Atif must have seen the sign in the drunk dark. After walking around the different entrances he finds the one that would be closest coming from the direction of the bar and Kierk takes the stairs down.